Westworld Season 1 Finale: Answers and Questions

Here's what we learned in the excellent season 1 finale of Westworld, and the possible questions raised:

1. The Man in Black is the new majority owner of Westworld.

2. The Man in Black is William, much older.  This is one of the first fine twists - a sequence of turns and revelations of events that cut deep.   What we've been seeing of Dolores during these ten episodes are not just skips and jumps and loops in her mind, but time itself chopped up, that is, earlier and more recent events in her life.   Meaning, regarding William, that every scene we've seen with him happened in the pretty distant past - i.e., decades ago.  Nice touch.

3. Dolores dying in Teddy's arms by the sea is actually the entree to the new narrative Ford has been promising.  I actually realized this a few moments before it was revealed, but it was still memorable to see.

4. Maeve, despite her best efforts, was never going to leave Westworld.  I was actually thinking this, too - the essence of Westworld is that, like the Hotel California, you can check in if you're a host (be created), but you can never leave.  But the pursuit of her daughter being the reason is an effective touch - because, after all, not only does love conquer all, but it's an all powerful component of what makes us human.

5. The path towards consciousness is knowing thyself.  In the Jaynesian bicameral mind - at least, as portrayed in Westworld - this means one half of your brain listening to the other.   Two millennia prior to Jaynes, Socrates urged the same thing: know thyself.   This makes Westworld not only Jaynesian but Socratic, a very good thing in my book.

6. I never bought that Socrates drank the hemlock, though (and my best-known novel tries  to explain what may really have happened back then) - but, with that in mind, I wasn't happy to see Dolores blow out Ford's brains at the end, just as she had done years earlier with Arnold (even though suffering that real-guilt pain is said to be only way she can achieve true consciousness).

And here's is where some questions for the next season come in.  Will Anthony Hopkins return next year as a Ford-host by whatever name, just as Arnold did with Bernard?  Hard to say, since Ford is not around any more to build a new version of him, just as Ford did with Bernard - and Arnold.  On the other hand, Bernard is no slouch, and he may indeed have the capability (and his success in recreating Ford would also be another testament to Ford's as well as Arnold's genius, since Ford built Bernard).  I certainly hope we see Ford again in some form, given the tour-de-force just wonderful performance this year by Hopkins (one of the best of his long and superb career, I'd say).

Also not 100% clear is what happened to the Man in Black aka old-William at the end.  Was that attacking force of (presumably) hosts armed with weapons that could kill him?  Maybe, probably, since it takes real death for the hosts to learn ... but you never know.

Anyway, this was the best television series ever about androids, and one of the best ever of science fiction, periods.  Kudos to all the writers, producers, actors and actresses, and HBO.  I learned a lot as well as enjoyed this series - and the only deaths I had to deal with regarding Westworld were those on the screen.

See also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams ... Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black? ... Westworld 1.3: Julian Jaynes and Arnold ... Westworld 1.4: Vacation, Connie Francis, and Kurt Vonnegut ... Westworld 1.5: The Voice Inside Dolores ... Westworld 1.6: Programmed Unprogramming ... Westworld 1.7: The Story of the Story ... Westworld 1.8: Memories ... Westworld 1.9: Half-Truths and Old Friends

 
another kind of capital punishment

#SFWApro

Westworld 1.9: Half-Truths and Old Friends

Another episode of Westworld tonight - 1.9 - just breathtaking in its philosophical insight and daring. The series, brilliant from the outset, just keeps getting better.

The agenda is set tonight with what Maeve, now in control of her android programmer, tells Bernard: truth is "like a good fuck - half is worse than none at all".

We've known less than half the truth about Bernard, until last week, when we found that he was a host aka android.   Tonight we learn that that was not the half of it.

Because, in another standout conversation between him and Ford, in which Bernard pushes Ford to tell him the truth about Bernard, and Ford presumably obliges, we find that Bernard is not just any host. Not even just any host put in charge by Ford to program and oversee the other hosts.  No, Bernard is a host programmed by Ford in Arnold's image.

Well, not just his image, but, presumably, something, maybe even a lot, of Arnold's mind.   Further, according to Ford, Arnold and Ford had two different ideas about how to build the minds of hosts - two different approaches, both of which co-exist, to some degree in each of the hosts we now encounter.   This is one iteration of Jaynes' bicameral mind,

The other iteration is that Arnold's idea of consciousness is that one voice within the mind talks to the other, and consciousness emerges as the two are in some way blended or brought into synch.  So, if this represents Arnold's idea of a host's consciousness, and it co-exists in the hosts' minds along with Ford's, we have a bicameral mind within a bicameral mind.   All that assuming, of course, that Ford was telling Bernard and us the truth - not a thoroughly reliable proposition, since Ford plays with Bernard and tells him half-truths and other-sized fragments in every conversation they have.

Hey, I told you the philosophical insight was daring.  And I'm not even 100% clear what we saw tonight means.  But I'm pretty sure that in this penultimate episode of the first season, we've received at least half the truth of what's going on.  Or maybe not, but let's go with that assumption.  It was certainly, to get back to Maeve's declaration, a movable feast for the intellect.

And the other half?  Well, I doubt we'll get all or even most of it next week, since, after all, this is only the first season.  But I'm looking forward to whatever little shred more we'll get.


See also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams ... Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black? ... Westworld 1.3: Julian Jaynes and Arnold ... Westworld 1.4: Vacation, Connie Francis, and Kurt Vonnegut ... Westworld 1.5: The Voice Inside Dolores ... Westworld 1.6: Programmed Unprogramming ... Westworld 1.7: The Story of the Story ... Westworld 1.8: Memories


  paradoxes of AI abound

Westworld 1.8: Memories

Much revealed in this excellent episode 1.8 of Westworld.

Probably the most important:  there are two kinds of programs afoot in Westworld, two kinds of stories (or two kinds of kinds of stories, to be more precise):  Ford's and Arnold's.  Ford's we pretty much know - though not the new story he keeps talking about - and Arnold's not much or any of it at all.

We learn from Ford that Arnold went crazy-mad over the paradox of programming beings that were sentient, yet in a way that keep them subject to programmer orders (the civil rights of robots, as I discussed in earlier reviews, and spelled out a little of in this paper).

So presumably in the minds of our major hosts, we have a war between these two types of programs - a war in each mind - which gives us a better but still not completely clear idea of the bicameral mind (ala Julian Jaynes) that we heard about some episodes back.

Whatever is actually going in each of these host's minds, we now know this:  none of them can keep those deep memories totally submerged, however much Ford or Bernard may order them to do - or just move the memories down to the bottom of the little tablet screen.  For Bernard, who we now know is a host, these unerasable memories include at least two murders of human beings, the second we saw last week, the first who knows when, presumably both at Ford's command, though we can't be sure about the first.   For Maeve, it's the awful memory of the killing of her daughter by the Man in Black (for more about, see below).  For Dolores, it's the memory of some kind of carnage in the town. Teddy may be having some of this double memory, too.

Significantly, Bernard can kill humans (presumably only at Ford's command, but who knows), and Maeve, even more profoundly, can kill in her own self protection - that, by the way, being a defining characteristic of life.  Teddy definitely can not - at least, not the Man in the Black.

Which is the other big revelation: the Man in Black tells Teddy his back story, and his life as a human tycoon (hmm....).  This sounds pretty convincing.  But earlier, Ford was even more convincing about humans and androids actually being pretty similar, in that both live in stories that are constructed (presumably the main difference being that we humans construct most of our own stories.)  Yet, I was just watching The Crown on Netflix, and struck by how much the royals are hostages to the stories they are obliged to follow.   But back to Westworld: is the Man in Black just telling Teddy a story written by a programmer, or the true story of his human life?

Ford, again, says there's not all that much difference.  My guess is the MIB is a human - but maybe it doesn't matter as much as we may think - maybe that's the message.  I do know this series is a masterpiece already - a triumph of story telling (I guess a third kind of story) - and it's good wasn't it to see Banshee's Lili Simmons back on the screen!

See also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams ... Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black? ... Westworld 1.3: Julian Jaynes and Arnold ... Westworld 1.4: Vacation, Connie Francis, and Kurt Vonnegut ... Westworld 1.5: The Voice Inside Dolores ... Westworld 1.6: Programmed Unprogramming ... Westworld 1.7: The Story of the Story


  paradoxes of AI abound

Westworld 1.6: Programmed Unprogramming

An outstanding Westworld 1.6 tonight - the series keeps getting better and better, Isaac Asimov (author of the three later four laws of robotics would've loved it) - now getting into some of the real paradoxes and ethical quandaries of artificial intelligence.

Early in the episode, Maeve, who gets herself choked to death so she can get back to her favorite programmer, obliges us to confront one of the fundamental questions of AI:  if an android is programmed to behave in an unprogrammed way, and indeed behaves in that way, is the android behaving in a programmed or unprogrammed manner?  This is a version of the infamous "be spontaneous" paradox: if someone asks you to act spontaneously, and you follow that advice and act spontaneously, are you really acting spontaneously or in response to the request?  Or, to flip that, if you defy the request and try to act un-spontaneously, are you acting spontaneously or not?  No matter how much you try to wiggle and wriggle out of it, the paradox has you in its grip.

Maeve nonetheless goes on, butt-naked, to negotiate what leads to a bunch of improvements in her mentality. Dolores was also naked last week, when she too was having a conversation not with just any programmer but with Ford - but Dolores didn't turn any tables on Ford, at least, not yet.

This week, Ford is on the move, and ends up in a house with some of the very first hosts, programmed by Arnold.   A boy we met last week kills his dog (a dog-droid or whatever the word would be), and Ford finds out, on carefully questioning the boy, that he did it because a voice in his head told him to do this.

The voice in the head - we found out the same about Dolores last week - and this brings us back to the bicameral mind.  Arnold has apparently created artificially intelligent beings - aka hosts - who receive some kind of instruction from him via his voice in their heads.  This is a nice play on Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind, and raises the question, again, if Arnold is really dead - at least, dead in original flesh and blood - or just a talkative chip in the android brain.

But underlying all of this is the ethical elephant in the room: if our hosts are becoming truly sentient, due to some combination of original programming and/or programming gone wrong and/or new overlays put in by Arnold or someone else in the park, do the human programmers have the right to order these androids around to suit their human interests?

I look forward to further exploration of these paradoxes of programming in the episodes ahead.  In the meantime, here's a little essay I published about The Rights of Robots back in 1999.

See also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams ... Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black? ... Westworld 1.3: Julian Jaynes and Arnold ... Westworld 1.4: Vacation, Connie Francis, and Kurt Vonnegut ... Westworld 1.5: The Voice Inside Dolores


  paradoxes of AI abound

Westworld 1.3: Julian Jaynes and Arnold

An outstanding episode 1.3 tonight of Westworld, turning out to be one brilliantly philosophical ride of a series, as we would want a drama about artificial intelligence in android bodies to be.

We learn from Dr. Ford that Arnold, who co-created the androids with Ford, thought that the creations could achieve true sentience via a bicameral mental process, in which the two halves of the mind worked together - one talking to the other - to attain human consciousness.   This, as far as I know, is the first time this theory of Julian Jaynes - that our own human consciousness arose from bicameral minds - has ever been employed as a mechanism in a science fiction television series.

It's appeared in science fiction - including in one of my own novels, The Consciousness Plague - but not as an explanation for the design and emergence of artificial sentience.  Jaynes was a real person, by the way, whose book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of Bicameral Mind caused something of a stir when it was first published in 1976.   Jaynes argued that prior to the invention and adoption of the phonetic alphabet in the Middle East, human beings were not conscious in the way that we have been ever since and are today, but instead heard voices in their heads that told them what to do.   Those voices are now known in our history as the voices of the Biblical prophets, and they survive today in schizophrenics.

We studied Jaynes in the Media Ecology PhD Program at New York University under Neil Postman. I once asked Marshall McLuhan what he thought of Jaynes and he said it was "science fiction" - another prophetic observation of McLuhan, who talked about the global village decades before the Internet and social media.   I met Jaynes a few times - he was charming and erudite.  But I thought his theory foundered in Far Eastern cultures, which are conscious the way we Westerners are, but never had a phonetic alphabet.

But that's no reason Jaynes' theory couldn't be brought into Westworld, which was really on a philosophic roll tonight, also invoking Karl Popper's notion that learning proceeds via mistakes, as Bernard muses about life and intelligence.   Neither Jaynes nor Popper were mentioned by name, but the presence of their core concepts in Westworld makes it not just science fiction but philosophic fiction, an amalgam you don't get on the television screen every day.

Meanwhile, Dolores's story (very well played by Evan Rachel Wood) is progressing beautifully - in beautiful sorrow, apropos her name - and we see some monsters in the park, with unclear origins. Also, a host kills himself with a rock to the head - presumably to stop himself from hurting one of the programmers.

Westworld is a trip for the mind as well as the senses, and I'm all eyes and ears for more.

See also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams ... Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black?




more about Julian Jaynes

Review of Connected: A Triple Threat Movie by Tiffany Shlain

Just saw Tiffany Shlain's new documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology via private online screening.  I saw an earlier version about a year ago, and was well impressed both times.

The movie is actually three in one -

1. Connected is a sagely and even delightfully presented story of our interconnectedness as a species - among ourselves, all living things, and the technologies through which we extend ourselves and give substance to our imaginations, plans, and desires.   In its warnings about what we can do wrong - such as Mao's killing of sparrows to improve harvests (sparrows eat seeds) which resulted in massive crop failure (fewer sparrows resulted in more locusts, also eaten by sparrows) - Connected is cousin to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.  In the hope it holds out for our new media, it is the kind of movie Buckminster Fuller might have made.

2.  Connected is a passionate biography of Leonard Shlain (1937-2009) - Tiffany's father - whose The Alphabet versus the Goddess (1999) argued that the advent of the alphabet over earlier forms of writing encouraged masculine thinking and dominance.   In its daring media determinism and historical sweep, the book put Leonard Shlain on a par with Julian Jaynes as a worthy successor to Marshall McLuhan in provocative and mind-opening hypothesis.

3. But Connected is most of all an autobiography of Tiffany Shlain, who recounts her inspiration by her father, her struggle with his passing, her struggle to make sense of the curves the universe has thrown her, and in one way or another, throws at all of us.   That's what it means to be an intelligent being in this world, someone who doesn't just accept what she or he finds, but seeks to understand it, get a little on top of it, and thereby have a little bit more say and control over the course of our lives and the world.

Narrated by Tiffany Shlain and Peter Coyote. Animated bits by Stefan Nadelman (of Food Fight fame). Highly recommended for students of media - indeed, for students of life.

Connected opens in major cities in America in September - here 's a list - and Fordham University will be hosting a special free screening on September 25 as part of its Media at the Center McLuhan Centenary symposia.

Note added October 14, 2011:  I was at the premiere screening in New York City - at the Angelika Film Center - earlier this evening.  The movie's better than ever on the big screen, and the audience loved it.  It's become increasingly clear to me, in the past few weeks, that Tiffany Shlain's movie is the story of humanity, and recent history in particular, leading up to the healthy resurgence of direct democracy in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street - triggered, stimulated, facilitated by the advent of social media, or what I call New New Media.  Which is what I'll be talking about when I lead a discussion with the audience after the October 19, Wednesday, 7:15pm screening, at The Angelika.